


Not the Voice That Commands

by rachelindeed



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, references to A Study in Scarlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-04 23:19:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3096287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/pseuds/rachelindeed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson is not an unobservant man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not the Voice That Commands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ocean_of_ink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ocean_of_ink/gifts).



> Many thanks to SCFrankles for the beta.

_“It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.” (Italo Calvino)_

~~

My friend Watson’s observational skills have been much maligned over the years. Indeed, I should be ready to confess myself their chief critic, had Watson not so often poked fun at them himself. He once remarked that, when facing a thorny problem, he needed only to suggest every solution that occurred to him, and then whatever remained, however improbable, must be the truth. In nearly twenty years of successful collaboration, I can count on the fingers of my hands the number of times he arrived at the correct conclusion of a case. 

It was his own particular talent that betrayed him. He had the fertile, fast imagination of a novelist, which constantly ran ahead of the facts and wove powerful, impressionistic portraits around the strange events and people we encountered. It was all very well to advise him not to theorize in advance of the evidence, but one might as well have advised him not to breathe – speculation and empathy worked within him as unconsciously and irresistibly as his lungs. 

Dr. John Watson has never been a reasoning machine, but he is not lacking in mental gifts. The same quick spirit that hobbles his objectivity has guided his pen to international acclaim. He has brought more cases to our door with his sensationalism than I could ever have won by pure wit. And on more than one occasion his insights into my own character have surprised me. He is very far from being an unobservant man.

It is the first of those quiet, personal observations of his that I wish to revisit. Watson has elsewhere recorded some of his first impressions of me, and it is typical of him that he published only those which were most in error. Having undertaken to puzzle me out, he did get rather further than his initial list of my ‘limits’ might suggest. I should like to set my own recollections alongside his. In doing so I must review – not without amusement and occasional chagrin – my own state of mind in the year ’81.

I classed my new acquaintance, first and foremost, as a doctor. Doctors, and general practitioners in particular, are busybodies by profession and often by personal inclination as well. I have always been fond of them as a class. I am fond of all persons who spend a good deal of their lives in other people’s parlors, and those whose training has given them diagnostic eyes are particularly useful. Medical men, too, are less cagey than domestic servants; they rarely perceive questions as threats and, provided names are left out of it, they will supply endless anecdotes to any fresh acquaintance at their bar or card table. In their cups, their conversation is most easily directed.

I viewed them as a satisfactory resource in my working life, but the prospect of living alongside such a specimen seemed to carry the potential for trouble. At the time I believed that my thought processes required solitude and silence; an audience was most welcome at the conclusion of my cases, but not before. As I would demand many hours of uninterrupted concentration, I expected to be perceived as unsociable, even morose. My irregular diet and unorthodox hobbies, to say nothing of the needle, could become easy fodder for a physician with an interfering cast of mind.

I had no real hope of simulating a healthy manner of living over the long-term, but I thought that regularity of habits might prove an adequate substitute. Such was certainly the philosophy of the army, where any danger could be made palatable by dint of routine. For the first six weeks of our shared residence I kept to myself as much as possible and retired to my bedroom – though not to my bed – by ten. Though I did not always manage to rise early, it was easy to create the impression that I had. My companion rarely ventured into our common rooms before me.

He was still quite ill in those days. The pallor of pain and long confinement had stolen under the tan of his face and hands, creating a strained impression, like old brick bound tight in fresh mortar. It was plain that his natural build had tended toward the square and muscular, but the enteric fever had reduced him to an ill-fitting slenderness. His movements were at times ungainly, though I perceived that his clumsiness was due less to his limp than to his tendency to forget it. He had been so used to an active life that he could not fully adjust to his lessened mobility. A circuit around Regent’s Park was enough to drain him for the whole day, and yet he would insist on taking it. His appetite waxed and waned as unpredictably as my own, for the root of his lingering troubles was digestive. Seeing that the forced irregularity of his own habits kept him silent about mine, I soon dropped my initial pretenses. It came as a relief to both of us, I think.

His eyes, though, were quick and vital. They were often turned on me, though he remained polite to a fault and masked his observation with various props from the table or the desk. He seemed genuinely pleased to watch his relatively featureless flatmate evolve into a domestic mystery, and at times he had trouble concealing his amusement at my more eccentric bona fides. I could not always resist the temptation to talk absolute rot to him for the pleasure of watching his eyebrows zoom. I often did the same to the Yarders, of course, but with them it was a rather mean-spirited pastime. Watson, however, proved nearly impossible to offend, and he had a delightful lexicon of backhanded diplomacy. “That’s rather a broad idea, Holmes,” he used to say, or – my personal favorite – “A question for the ages, my dear fellow.” I worked very hard to get a “surely not” out of him, but his well of courteous, equivocal skepticism never seemed to run dry.

As a reward for his intelligent interest, I arranged to conclude our first case together by capturing the murderer in the relative comfort of our sitting room. It seemed only sporting, as Watson could not have chased anyone down even the length of our street, and it would have been cruel to stage the denouement without him. I failed to anticipate, however, that a first floor window would fall casualty to the struggle. I regretted both the draught and the expense, for Watson could ill afford to deal with either – and, frankly, nor could I – but he uttered no complaint. On the contrary, I found him practically ebullient as the March wind disarranged his desk later that evening. He rescued his case notes from the swirl and cheerfully adopted my trick of jackknifing them to the mantel, all the while prompting me to retrace my chains of reasoning in greater detail. For the first time in our acquaintance I caught a glimpse of his natural energy, and there was something so infectious in his looks that I nearly laughed aloud at his repeated insistence that someone must write up the whole affair to my credit. I did not for a moment take him seriously. Nevertheless, I found that my thoughts and explanations flowed easily as we talked.

Being the object of his study was a parlor game back then, and I little anticipated that anything more worthwhile would ever come of it. Certainly I was far from expecting him to diagnose anything about my mind or my way of working that I myself had overlooked. But he listened to me that night, and he must have registered the tinge of surprise I felt at the way my thoughts seemed to string themselves together in their telling.

He stored that fact away, as I did not, and over the following weeks he turned his ears to me as often as his eyes. He asked me to deduce the passers-by on Baker Street, and for every assertion I made he would inquire after all my reasons. I had not explained myself to such an extent since childhood. Mycroft was always ahead of me rather than behind, and with clients it was more effective to produce conclusions from thin air. To demystify my methods was to risk hearing them trivialized, but of course Watson took the opposite tack. In response to his praise, I began to make more and more deductions aloud, occasionally interrupting myself as a fresh connection sparked between the facts. 

After the Hope case, Watson also asked permission to sit in on my client interviews. I told him he was welcome. As I have mentioned, however, at that time his poor health made him a late riser. On two or three occasions he entered the sitting room in the middle of an appointment. He would apologize and offer to withdraw, I would wave him to a chair, and our confused clients, after a brief pause in which they awaited instruction, usually restarted their narrative from the beginning. I found this process of retelling to be a highly instructive one; the very first time it happened a key detail emerged only on my second hearing. Even when clients offered no fresh information, it was tremendously useful to watch the different shades of emotion they exhibited when repeating themselves. It was an almost failsafe method for catching out dissimulations, for anyone who set out to lie about a relationship or an event had usually carefully prepared their words and their emotional performance. They were most of them undone by the need to recreate their desired impression and tended to overplay their hand. I was so well pleased with the dividends of this new interview strategy that I commended my flatmate for his tardiness and urged him to often repeat it.

Up to that point I had found it moderately useful to indulge Watson’s desire to assist me in my work, but I began to have second thoughts one morning when he took up the first edition paper and began to read out items he supposed to be of interest. I retreated to the sofa and my own thoughts. The following day, when he did so again over breakfast, I vividly remember being struck with sharp dismay at the thought that I had so incautiously invited another person into my business. Even more unwisely, I had chosen a person I lived with and could not escape. Now he was inventing errands to occupy himself and intruding them on me. Redundant work is no work at all, and the thought that I might have to tolerate a daily reading club for the sake of domestic peace upset me to an unreasonable degree. I had invented my own profession precisely to avoid the burden of well-meaning associates whose attempts to help would in truth be no more than a hindrance. I had excellent eyes and an excellent brain behind them; I required no assistance with my papers. I told Watson as much without the least finesse.

Looking back on it now, I cannot help but wince. I was abrupt; I was insulting. Watson has long since become expert at dealing with my pride without surrendering his own, but we were so new to each other then. He took my rebuke to heart, and I really believe he was in danger of withdrawing entirely from further involvement in our cases. Not out of resentment at my high-handedness, but in the genuine conviction that he could be of little use. He has a deeply ingrained sense of delicacy, a horror of imposing himself where he is unwanted, that has always been foreign to me. This reticence was amplified by his illness, for he viewed himself as an invalid. In the days that followed he went to some trouble to share meals and cigars with good cheer, to show me there were no hard feelings on his side, but he no longer asked after my observations and he gave the sitting room a wide berth during consultations. 

Over the course of a tempestuous and dangerous career, I have almost lost Watson on several occasions. But rarely have I come closer than I did during that cold, early spring. Had we settled more permanently into the polite but distant friendliness towards which we were drifting, I would never have known enough to grieve.

Fortunately, however, the violin intervened.

I was working my way through a dozen of Geminiani’s baroque exercises, I remember, and contemplating the various disguises which I might use to continue a robbery investigation. Watson had been nowhere in evidence for hours, but in the brief break between compositions I caught a fragment of conversation between him and our housekeeper as their voices drifted up the stairwell.

“…can’t hear himself think with that racket!”

“He is thinking, Mrs. Hudson. The sound helps.”

 _The sound helps._ That simple phrase was the first deduction I ever heard from Watson. 

The premise that my brain might perform best in tandem with my ear was a new one to me, but as I played I turned the idea over in my head. I began to see its potential. Of course I had long known that music had both a calming and a freeing effect on my mind. But I had never thought to generalize outwards from my unique passion to the wider realm of sound. Yet, now that the connection had been pointed out, I did recall the way that explaining my thinking aloud had seemed simultaneously to clarify it. And perhaps part of the advantage of hearing clients repeat their stories was the simple opportunity to review the facts aurally rather than merely mentally. Watson’s attempts to read to me might not have been as misguided as I had assumed, but may have reflected an unexpected level of insight.

Though it may shock my readers to hear it, tobacco ash holds no inherent fascination for me. However, since its accurate delineation is vital to the field of criminal investigation, it has won considerable amounts of my time and attention. Likewise, collaboration was not my natural métier, but if it could make me more effective or efficient, I was willing to learn how to navigate the necessary compromises.

When Watson returned upstairs, I could ask him to be so good as to read out the day’s correspondence. He would be taken aback, but pleasantly so, and I would sort through the details as I heard them and choose the most promising problem for tomorrow. Having been teased with the beginning of a mystery, his curiosity would surely lure him back to his desk tomorrow at the appropriate hour – or a little after – without any need for awkward discussion between us. I could, over time, test whether verbalizing the steps of my reasoning process improved my results, and explore the extent to which hearing rather than reading information affected my ability to organize, associate, and retain the data.

The prospect of sharpening my skills was always exciting. If, in the process, I could aid a struggling fellow lodger who had shown me nothing but kindness, so much the better. In all respects, it seemed a worthwhile experiment.

The results of that experiment are too obvious to recount, but I will say thus much: There are many who suppose, correctly, that I am a better man for knowing Watson. But there are few, I think, who realize that I am also a better detective. The first service he rendered me – before friendship, before fame – was to help me better understand the workings of my own mind. 

He sped my thoughts. It was a grand gift. The first of many.


End file.
